Shakespeare may have said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but you can’t smell taxes and the principle doesn’t apply to them. The evidence? Call the estate tax a death tax and suddenly support for it drops, even among people who agree with it in principle, whose communities would benefit from it, and who would benefit from it personally, as Frank Luntz showed. I support[…] Keep reading →

Do people understand what they’re saying when they talking about “seeing things as they really are?” Do they realize it makes no sense? Let’s say you’re seeing things for not what they are. Do they imagine you have some special faculty that you were not using but when you decide to, you can just use your reality-seeing eyes instead of your what? false-seeing eyes? If you misperceived or were deceived[…] Keep reading →

What’s more exotic, a mango or a turnip? In New York City, and most of the U.S., you can buy mangoes at many stores. Turnips are harder to find. People say they travel to experience new, exotic things. But they don’t see that there are new things in their back yards. What’s sweeter, ice cream or an apple? Ice cream has more sugar than apples and for most Americans, who[…] Keep reading →

Apparently of all the materials we mine, extract, harvest and so on, after six months, less than one percent is still in use or in the product we got it for. Over 99% of what we get from the earth is used that long. I found that statistic from The Story of Stuff (video and annotated script). These two pages 21 Surprising Statistics That Reveal How Much Stuff We Actually[…] Keep reading →

Mark Bidwell, founder and podcast host of Innovation Ecosystem, posted today a wonderful interview about Leadership Step by Step, experiential learning, exercises, and more. I can only describe Mark as someone who gets it. He ascended the corporate ladder, where he drove innovation, built teams, and so on, then found there was more to life and is creating resources to enable others to. If you are looking to improve your[…] Keep reading →

Sami Honkonen records Boss Level Podcast Interviews with interesting people doing awesome things Boss Level is a podcast on people and organizations aiming for the boss level. Boss level is the status a person or an organization achieves by making a better quality of life for themselves and others by doing what they need to do regardless of all the haters and obstacles out there. I love his interview of[…] Keep reading →

Continuing my series of responses to the New York Times’, The Ethicist, without imposing values, here is my take on today’s post, “What to Do About a Physician Who May Be a Quack.” I live in an affluent community in New Jersey. I am a scientist with a Ph.D. and have worked for a company that researched Lyme disease. I am very involved with our hospital, where the head of[…] Keep reading →

Consider two travelers. One went online, bought a plane ticket to a spot half way around the world, took a taxi to the airport by highway he’s been on countless times, got in a plane—a long metal tube he can’t see out of—sat, confined, packed with hundreds of others, was fed food from a box, watched movies on a tiny screen, slept fitfully, eventually emerged in an airport similar to[…] Keep reading →

If you separate the following things, I think you’re making a mistake: Work and life If you’re trying to balance work and life, I think you made a bigger mistake in separating them, even if you balance them somehow. You don’t stop living when you’re at work and why would you stop working in “regular” life outside of work if you love what you do for work. You love your[…] Keep reading →